Why do dedicated cameras take such horrible panoramas?

Why do dedicated cameras take such horrible panoramas?

Kalalau Lookout: 9 images from my Nikon D300 stitched together in Photoshop back in 2007.

Back before we had this newfangled technology built into our cameras and phones that automatically create panoramas, we previously had to stitch together such a photo inside apps like Photoshop. It used to be a tedious process but has gotten much easier.

Once the smartphone revolution happened and everyone started developing apps, a number of interesting companies were launched that tried to make it easier to create panoramas from your mobile device. One of the first ones I can remember was Cloudburst Research, who wrote the awesome Autostitch app for iOS way back in 2009. It worked similar to how you'd put together a panorama in Photoshop -- snap or import a bunch of overlapping photos and it cuts out the most relevant pieces and stitches them together.



Farallon Islands off of San Francisco. I stitched this together using an iPhone 3GS and the Autostitch app in 2009.

When Apple released iOS 6 in 2012, they included the ability to create panoramas on your phone in real time by panning your phone left or right. Other phones had the ability to do this before, but I'd argue that this is when the popularity of panoramic photos really took off, thanks to the quality and ease of creation.



Dodger Stadium panorama: Taken in 2013 with an iPhone 5 and iOS 6's built-in panorama app.

I've consistently been impressed with the quality of panoramas that are coming straight out of my phone with no additional post-processing needed.



San Francisco skyline: Taken with an iPhone 5 and iOS 7 on a moving ferry. The ferry's movement cause some issues with generating the panorama -- you can see this in wavy / uneven lines on the Bay Bridge.

Anyway, this brings me all the way to cameras. The RX100 MII is generally thought to be one of the best pocketable cameras that you can buy today. Great image quality and super portable too. It includes a number of interesting features, among them, the ability to generate panoramas on the camera itself.

This is why I'm genuinely surprised that the RX100's ability to generate panoramas is really poor. In fact, it's so bad, that I refuse to use it, so I don't have an personal photos to share. This one below is from a user in the DP Review forums:



Taken with an RX100 and stitched together using the camera's built in panorama feature. Notice the color banding and uneven lines on the horizon between each frame.

Anyway, what gives? I really love panoramas for their ability to capture an extended scene. But even a camera as awesome as the RX100, with a great lens, sensor, and outstanding image quality, has trouble generating these sorts of images. One obvious answer is that our phones have much more powerful processors that are capable of doing real-time analysis and creation of these types of images. Of course, if you want to do a serious picture, you'll probably set up a tripod and take multiple frames and stitch them together in post-processing (and looking at my Hawaii image at the top of this post, it's obviously the highest quality panorama of any shown here).

But bottom line, if I want to take a quick panorama, it's easier and more reliable to just pull out the phone. It's really amazing how powerful these pocket sized computers are.